The problems with live coding interviews
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The problems with live coding interviews
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Re: The problems with live coding interviews
#2Your experience sounds horrible, and unfortunately those sort of "tests" are just a horrible thing. Generally, do NOT do take-home exercises. That's your time, which has value; the company doing the hiring contributes nothing.
At least, in a live-coding exercise both you and they have some skin in the game. As with all tests, good or bad, part of the test is actually doing the test. Often it's less what you know, or could do; and more about "can you do the test?", and mostly "doing the test" is a poor proxy, and the whole exercise becomes a waste of everyone's time.
Re: The problems with live coding interviews
#3Your experience sounds horrible, and unfortunately those sort of "tests" are just a horrible thing. Generally, do NOT do take-home exercises. That's your time, which has value; the company doing the hiring contributes nothing. At least, in a live-coding exercise both you and they have some skin in the game. As with all tests, good or bad, part of the test is actually doing the test. Often it's less what you know, or…
That’s not always accurate that the company doing the hiring contributes nothing. (Also good companies could offer to pay for that take-home test time.)
Having done take home before from the hiring side, it was incredibly time-consuming for us. We had someone anonymize the three finalist submissions, and then we had three people each individually review and comment on each one, and then we got together to discuss and choose the final candidate. Once we agreed on one, only then was it de-anonymized.
All-in, it took way more time than a single developer doing three live coding interviews. But my guess would be that most companies wouldn’t be willing to be that deliberate with take home.
Re: The problems with live coding interviews
#4Your experience sounds horrible, and unfortunately those sort of "tests" are just a horrible thing. Generally, do NOT do take-home exercises. That's your time, which has value; the company doing the hiring contributes nothing. At least, in a live-coding exercise both you and they have some skin in the game. As with all tests, good or bad, part of the test is actually doing the test. Often it's less what you know, or…
The last time I did a take home exercise for a position I wrote something that was beyond the team's skillset. That was awkward.
Re: The problems with live coding interviews
#5Your experience sounds horrible, and unfortunately those sort of "tests" are just a horrible thing. Generally, do NOT do take-home exercises. That's your time, which has value; the company doing the hiring contributes nothing. At least, in a live-coding exercise both you and they have some skin in the game. As with all tests, good or bad, part of the test is actually doing the test. Often it's less what you know, or…
The last time I did a take home exercise for a position I wrote something that was beyond the team's skillset. That was awkward.
That's a great reason to do the take home test. You learn a huge amount about the team by how they react to your code.
Re: The problems with live coding interviews
#6Very on point and I can truly relate to all of this. I'm so frustrated by the whole process that I've started to decline live coding interviews and any take-home exercises that take more than half a day to complete. Although I have over a decade experience in my field, have been a tech-lead at some of the largest corps, contributed to open source, mentored many Engineers, and really enjoy software, this whole experience is pushing me away from the field. I kind of don't care to prove anything to anyone anymore over a 45min interview... will probably start a small biz and move far away from "silicon valley" types of people/mindsets.
Re: The problems with live coding interviews
#7A perspective from the other side of the desk (playing devil's advocate here):
There's a fundamental skill that a good programmer has to have, and that is to be able to take a novel problem that they haven't seen before and break it down to solve it in a sensible way.
There are plenty of programmers who fake their way through a career without having that skill. They just copy stuff and never really understand it. They're fine for some types of programming career, but if your business involves solving new and novel problems then you have to know which type of programmer you're hiring.
A contrived live coding exercise gives you a strong signal on this. It does have a decent chance of producing a false negative, but only a very small chance of a false positive, and that's the trade that has to be made with this kind of approach.
Is a better option to not do this kind of assessment, hire the person, find out that they can't do the hard bits and then fire them within 6 months? I'll take some convincing of that...
Re: The problems with live coding interviews
#8Very on point and I can truly relate to all of this. I'm so frustrated by the whole process that I've started to decline live coding interviews and any take-home exercises that take more than half a day to complete. Although I have over a decade experience in my field, have been a tech-lead at some of the largest corps, contributed to open source, mentored many Engineers, and really enjoy software, this whole experie…
> any take-home exercises that take more than half a day to complete
jeez, i would reject if they took more than 5 minutes
Re: The problems with live coding interviews
#9A perspective from the other side of the desk (playing devil's advocate here): There's a fundamental skill that a good programmer has to have, and that is to be able to take a novel problem that they haven't seen before and break it down to solve it in a sensible way. There are plenty of programmers who fake their way through a career without having that skill. They just copy stuff and never really understand it. The…
> but if your business involves solving new and novel problems then you have to know which type of programmer you're hiring.
Its more that businesses don’t know what type of programming they do and are just hazing people for no reason
More like one person is just hazing people due to a strongly held unobjective opinion like yours
Don’t know the better option, just the limitations of this one
Re: The problems with live coding interviews
#10A perspective from the other side of the desk (playing devil's advocate here): There's a fundamental skill that a good programmer has to have, and that is to be able to take a novel problem that they haven't seen before and break it down to solve it in a sensible way. There are plenty of programmers who fake their way through a career without having that skill. They just copy stuff and never really understand it. The…
> “take a novel problem that they haven't seen before and break it down”
But who does that professionally as a stand-up performance, clock ticking, a judge breathing down your neck who has been equipped with a script that tells him things like “if candidate doesn’t do X within the first ten minutes it’s very bad”?
Doing well in that situation depends more on social performance skills than problem-solving skills. You’re essentially trying to infer the interview script that the interviewer has in mind and act it out convincingly.
If someone says “I’d like to start by taking ten minutes alone in another room and think it out first”, will they get hired? Probably not. It’s not the expected performance even if the solution is fine.